Cognitive Development involves cognitive processes such as knowing, thinking, remembering, recognizing, categorizing, imagining, reasoning, decision-making, and so forth.According to Piaget, childrens understanding of the world expands as they experience new ideas and challenges. Children construct their own knowledge through interaction with their surroundings. Cognitive development proceeds as children mature.Piaget divided cognitive development into four stages.The Sensorimotor Stage (0-2 years)The Pre-Operational Stage (2-7 years)The Concrete Operational Stage (7-11 years)The Formal Operational Stage (11 years and above) ?The Pre-Operational Stage:This is the second stage of cognitive development which is basically a pre-logical stage as logic has not yet fully developed. It extends from two to seven years of age.We saw that towards the end of the second year, the child becomes capable of representing experiences mentally without interacting with them directly or physically. Also that the child begins to understand that symbols represent certain aspects of reality.At this age, the child exhibits symbolic representation which means the ability to deal with symbols. Although the child is able to think about symbols still he lacks reversibility. According to Piaget, symbolic representation is a representational ability that emerges when the child is about 22-24 months old. It is a unified capacity that enables the child to represent an object or an event that is not present (a signified) by means of another object that is present (a signifier).The child during this stage engages in what is called a symbolic play that is, the wooden box is considered as a car, a rounding, the steering wheel and the stick, a gun. A child pretends to ride a broomstick to represent riding a horse.In language, signs are part of the existing structure that we use to communicate so children start learning signs first to communicate their language.Thus, it is concluded that Raghav pretends to ride a broomstick to represent riding a horse, this ability is called symbolic representation.Additional InformationEgocentrism refers to the child's inability to infer the perspective of other people or to see a situation from others' points of view.Conservation refers to the idea that a quantity remains the same despite changes in appearance. If you show a child four marbles in a row, then spread them out, the preoperational child will focus on the spread, and tend to believe that there are now more marbles than before.Seriation refers to the ability to sort objects or situations according to any characteristic, such as size, color, shape, or type. For example, they can arrange a set of pencils of different sizes in ascending or descending order.